Following the previous workshops on laughter held in Saarbruecken (2007) and Berlin (2009), we have the pleasure to announce a forthcoming workshop in Dublin in October 2012.

The studies of non-verbal vocal interaction is proving to be important in many research areas such as phonetics and discourse analysis, and also in more technology-oriented fields such as social signal processing and human behaviour understanding. Previous research has shown that laughter and other nonverbal vocalisations (e.g., breath sounds, yawning, sighing) have important functions in social interaction, for example, giving feedback, signaling engagement, and regulating turn-taking. However, much of the phonetic characteristics of non-verbal vocalisations, and the relationship between social functions and non-verbal vocalisations is still unknown.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together scientists from diverse research areas and to provide an exchange forum for interdisciplinary discussions in order to gain a better understanding of laughter and other non-verbal vocalisations. The workshop will consist of invited talks, oral presentations of ongoing research and discussion papers.

We invite research contributions concerning laughter and other non-verbal vocalisations from the fields of phonetics, linguistics, psychology, conversation analysis, and human-machine interaction. In particular, topics related to the following aspects are very much welcomed:

Researchers are invited to submit an abstract of their work, including work in progress. Please send your abstract of max. 2 pages (plain text) in PDF format to trouvain (at) coli.uni-saarland.de specifying 'Dublin workshop' in the subject line and providing:

1. For each author: name, title, affiliation in the body of the mail 2. Title of abstract